A Farewell To Trump
Goodbye to the abuser-in-chief.

When kids grow up in difficult situations or abusive homes, they learn to watch every nuance of their abuser’s behavior. They see the slight wince that hints at a headache that can turn, on a dime, into a midnight rampage. They engage in a rigorous postmortem after every incident, picking apart their own behavior to determine where they themselves went wrong. They even police other people in the situation to further try to control the abuser’s behavior; they accept and bask in the sick praise and tainted gifts the abuser hands out as a reward.
But this work is all built on sand. It all predicates that the abuser’s behavior is logical. It runs on the cognitive dissonance that allows the child to accept this logic, which contradicts everything their mind tells them, everything their instincts are screaming. In their heart, the child believes that challenging that logic will unravel the whole world.
It doesn’t have to, though. Someone else can come into the situation and, with a sentence or two, expose the abuser forever; some new perspective can shine a light that exposes the nastiness in the dark. It does all unravel — with time and work and luck — but the world goes on, it just stops revolving around the abuser. The rampages become just that — undeserved vitriol without provocation. It’s not you: it’s *them*. And the further you get away from the situation, the more their power shrinks. If you are lucky, you will live to see them as small and shriveled and sad, because they cannot survive without your fear or your adulation.
I do not want to analyze Trump’s every wince anymore. I do not want to sift through the palace intrigue he gleefully stokes, watching him mete out praise, rewards, vitriol, and punishment on a whim. I do not want to wait, with knotted stomach, for him to drop the latest pronouncement that turns someone’s world inside out, and then retcon a reason. The greatest trick the devil pulls is convincing you that his behavior is rooted in any logic beyond power, control, or pure pleasure.
Watching Trump scream his random words last night before an adoring crowd — throwing insults and threats at his enemies, a list that waxes and wanes based not on logic but whim; sucking up praise like a leech; puffing himself up like a turkey; laying out a twisted truth that he dares you to counteract…he sent me back there, one more time, so I could really get why this feels sickeningly familiar.
It took me a while, but I think I’ve really got it. I can’t make a clean break — every day, this administration invents fresh hells that threaten me and those I love — but I can try not to engage in the 24-hour maelstrom of Trump news and Trump tweets and Trump analysis that keeps me repelled and fascinated in equal measure. I can at least try not to click through or share “guess what he said NOW” content, because I don’t need to experience or amplify his abuse. I can read history and articles to help me understand everything else that is happening — North Korea, Confederate statues, the demise of HUD. I can give money and speak up. There’s so much to learn and so much to fight that I just don’t have time for the abuse anymore.
